If Reece Topley started his World Cup in a hurry, shredding Bangladesh’s top order with two wickets in his first over of the tournament, it is entirely understandable. After last year’s T20 World Cup and the IPL, this is the third global tournament he has travelled to in the past year or so, and in neither of the other two has he managed to get to the third over.
Many seamers struggle with injuries, the inevitable result of forcing the body to repeat very unnatural movements at high speed and high frequency, and Topley has endured several. But the two that ended those tournaments were something different: in Brisbane last year he tripped backwards over the boundary padding while warming up for a warm-up game and managed to rupture ligaments in his ankle, and in Bengaluru in March he dived in the field and dislocated a shoulder.
